Barack Obama is poised to become “our first president who is a civil libertarian,” Jeffrey Rosen wrote hopefully and not without reason, less than 6 months ago. But it didn’t take long for the audacity of politics to expose the naivete of hope. Today, given Obama’s support for the grossly and gratuitously anti-libertarian FISA amendments (painstakingly explored by the tireless Glenn Greenwald,) civil libertarians are likely to vote for him with a lot more resignation than enthusiasm.

As engines of creativity and innovation, colleges are always pushing the envelope on scholarship. While this is usually good – since it broadens our culture’s collective knowledge – occasionally you see some really idiotic proposals and research agendas coming out of the American academy. And each time you think you’ve seen the last truly dumb idea – at least for a while – emerge from a college campus, along comes an even dumber one to challenge your grasp on reality.

As engines of creativity and innovation, colleges are always pushing the envelope on scholarship. While this is usually good – since it broadens our culture’s collective knowledge – occasionally you see some really idiotic proposals and research agendas coming out of the American academy. And each time you think you’ve seen the last truly dumb idea – at least for a while – emerge from a college campus, along comes an even dumber one to challenge your grasp on reality.

Hillary Clinton has a new excuse for continuing a campaign that is most likely doomed and clearly destructive: genetic determinism: “ I’ve come to believe that hard work, determination and resiliency are encoded in our DNA,” she declared, speaking to a group of female supporters in West Virginia, the New York Times reports.

The Boston Globereported this morning that although Attorney General Michael Mukasey will still speak at this year's Boston College Law School commencement, the school has decided that it would nonetheless "deny Mukasey the Founder's Medal," which celebrates "traditions of professionalism, scholarship, and service which the Law School seeks to instill in its students."

I’m old enough to have concluded, not so long ago, that I probably would not live to see Americans elect a truy reflexive – yet thoughtful – civil libertarian as President. I had hoped that Bill Clinton would be such a President, at least until he actually moved into the White House. Just his act of signing the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) (summary here) was enough to sober me up.

So the truth about waterboarding finally comes out, thanks in no small part to the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage among the most astute journalists to chronicle the sins of omission and commission made by the Bush administration and its lawyers over the last seven years. In this morning's Globe, Savage reports that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to investigate the CIA’s torture practices, in part because investigating those who relied on the advice of legal counsel would undermine the credibility of the government’s lawyers.

In response to Juvenal's maxim "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" -- "Who will watch the watchmen?" -- comes the apparent reply, no one. Think Progress reports that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, established on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, is now "officially vacant. The terms of the original members expired on Jan.

It's foolish to seek logic in appeals to religious faith, especially those made while campaigning, but I can’t help interrogating Fred Thompson’s refrain that our "basic rights come from God and not from any government." What exactly does this imply – that if Christians are denied the right to proselytize, they should pray for the right to be restored instead of petitioning their government? When people are fired or not hired on the basis of race, religion, or sex, should they turn to their spiritual leaders for help instead of their lawyers?

In this week's Boston Phoenix, Harvey Silverglate writes about how a troubling new obstruction-of-justice statute, and a precedent set in a Connecticut kiddie-porn case, could be used to prosecute the CIA if the government brings obstruction charges related to the destruction of the so-called "torture tapes."

Thank god for religious minorities: when members of minority faiths run for office they have little choice but to defend religious liberty and give at least a nod to separation of church and state. Appealing to our tradition of pluralism and, like John Kennedy, promising that as president he would not take direction from his church, even Mitt Romney occasionally sounded a little like a civil libertarian in his virtually obligatory speech on faith.

Friendly, occasionally funny, less doctrinaire than many of his fellow conservatives and more approachable than the authoritarian Rudy Giuliani and robotic Mitt Romney, Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is the right wing preacher/politician/presidential hopeful that some liberals are learning to like.

In the August 15, 2007 Boston Phoenix, Harvey described the criminal case against Powers Fasteners as a likely form of extortion, in which Attorney General Martha Coakley's motive in pursuing the company was to extort civil settlements from it and, more importantly, other companies -- such as contractor Bechtel -- with enough money to buy their way out.

Despite having questioned Governor Deval Patrick's fidelity to freedom earlier today, we applaud his recent decision to appoint Francis Fecteau, a Massachusetts Superior Court judge in Worcester, to the state Appeals Court. Fecteau was the judge who, in July 2006, granted a new trial for Bernard Baran, whom Harvey Silverglate is representing as part of Baran's post-conviction defense team.

When Massachusetts residents elected Deval Patrick governor just over a year ago, it was a sign that this state had finally become fed up with sixteen years of Republican pols who treated the office as part plaything, part stepping stone to higher electoral office. For some of us, a liberal administration in the State House – who had previously been an Assistant Attorney General for civil rights in the Clinton administration – was a sign that Patrick would act as a “freedom governor” as well as a “compassionate liberal.